[beagle3]

Let me play the devil’s advocate: you buying those products is measurably better for those disadvantaged blue collar workers, than you not buying it (on a 10 year horizon IIRC - There are some UN studies on this, on phone and can’t find them right now).

So you are damned if you don’t enjoy them, damned if you do (but a bit less). Obviously, it is better if you could improve their situation to the point where their labor stops being cheap.... but how can you do that?

[tr3ndyBEAR]

> Obviously, it is better if you could improve their situation to the point where their labor stops being cheap.... but how can you do that?

The big thing missing from this conversation is how the US/multi-national corporations use international organizations like the IMF and World Bank to force "structural adjustment" policies that end up degrading labor protections, forcing countries to privatize all gov't functions, etc. We have played a big role in the destruction of their "situation". Both historically through colonialism and still actively today with IOs and structural adjustment policies

Not to mention all the fucking coups the US enacted and supported: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

[methodover]

I'm sympathetic to that idea, to some extent. Foreign workers would indeed be happy to get a marginal increase in their income, even if those wages and working conditions are well below developed-country standards.

But, then, aren't we just making a trade at that point? I will fire 100 local blue collar workers, and hire 100 foreign workers who will do their job for less. I hurt 100 people, help 100 people, and along the way pocket some extra cash for myself. I think most moral systems would have a problem with this. It is generally thought of as immoral to rend one person in order to help one other.

(Yes, things get complicated when you hurt N people to help more than N people, depending on the number of extra people helped and the kind of hurt. For example, sacrificing soldiers in order to save an entire country. Generally speaking though, most moral systems have a problem with hurting people against their will except in extraordinary situations involving very large numbers. Does this trade situation qualify as that? I'm skeptical that is does.)

There has to be a better way. Some way where we aren't harming local blue collar workers, but are still helping foreign nations develop, while giving those foreign nations on the path of strong worker protections and wages that we have here.

[harryh]

It is generally thought of as immoral to rend one person in order to help one other.

Not when it comes to buying things, which is what this situation is.

Blue collar workers in the US (or other developed nations) don't have a moral demand on you to purchase their labor at the same rate forever. If someone across the street (or across an ocean) is selling the same product for less money it's perfectly fine to buy it from them instead.

Do you think it's immoral when you, say, switch from Verizon to AT&T to get a cheaper rate on your cell phone plan?

[tomatotomato37]

The thing is that US workers have a lower bound on the fee they can charge for their labor, due to minimum wage laws. Those laws were enacted because we as a country believe there's a moral duty to ensure a minimum quality of life for it's working citizens (and in extension humans in general). Letting industries who would historically underpay US workers to instead just underpay some other countries workers defeats the whole purpose of those minimum wage laws, causing a worse quality of life then if nothing was done at all. Countries that want to treat its citizens well need to reign in that globalist behavior.

[harryh]

The current US unemployment rate is 3.5% which is near all time historical lows.

Virtually no one is unemployed in the US because of the combination of international trade and minimum wage laws.

[tomatotomato37]

That's because most vulnerable workers are either skirting labor laws through the gig economy or have given up and dropped out of the labor pool altogether, which means for whatever reason they don't get counted in the unemployment rate

[harryh]

To whatever extent that is happening, there is no evidence that it has happening more today than it was happening 50 years ago (before globalization) so comparing the unemployment rate of today to the unemployment rate then is still a perfectly valid comparison.

[methodover]

There are more ways to measure the health of the American worker than the BLS' unemployment rate. What about other statistics? Things like like...

- Wage growth over time - Health outcomes - Savings rate - Credit card debt rate - Feelings about the future (are we on the right track/wrong track?)

[harryh]

OPs comment asserted that developed world workers were being hurt specifically because of the combination of free trade and a minimum wage caused unemployment. My comment was refuting that specific argument.

The stats you mention are interesting but not relevant to OPs assertion that a wage floor in developed nations was problematic in a free trade world.

[CharlesColeman]

> The thing is that US workers have a lower bound on the fee they can charge for their labor, due to minimum wage laws. Those laws were enacted because we as a country believe there's a moral duty to ensure a minimum quality of life for it's working citizens (and in extension humans in general).

Also: things cost more in the US. You can't survive on 3rd world sweatshop wages in the US, even if they were permitted by abolishing minimum wage laws.

[AnthonyMouse]

How much of that is just the recursion though? If a bus driver in Washington got paid the same as a bus driver in China, they couldn't afford to take the bus. Except that if they got paid the same as a bus driver in China, it would cost less to take the bus.

[CharlesColeman]

> How much of that is just the recursion though? If a bus driver in Washington got paid the same as a bus driver in China, they couldn't afford to take the bus. Except that if they got paid the same as a bus driver in China, it would cost less to take the bus.

Very little, actually. Bus drivers need to buy more than bus tickets: even if you reduced their wages to third-world levels and reduced bus ticket prices to third-world levels, bus drivers still get sick and need to pay the doctor? Are you going to push doctor salaries down to third-world levels too? What about education, etc? At some point, you're just going to be pushing wages down across the economy and importing massive levels of inequality.

Expecting to people to take massive pay cuts and enact massive deflation in the name of market liberalism is frankly an ideologically-blinkered, impractical, stupid idea. It entails too much pain for little to no actual gain. The only people happy with the results would be a s small minority of oligarchs and ideological purists.

[tengbretson]

> If someone across the street (or across an ocean) is selling the same product for less money it's perfectly fine to buy it from them instead.

The people across the ocean in this instance are working obscene hours under deplorable conditions. When you take your business to these overseas firms you are effectively telling your local workers "these are the conditions I think you ought to be working under."

Except it's even worse because you don't have the stones to say it to their face.

[aetherson]

If you don't take your business to them, you're effectively telling local workers that they should work under even worse conditions for less pay. Except that you somehow doublethink yourself into imagining that you're being noble.

[tengbretson]

I think we got our wires crossed.

"When you take your business to them you are effectively telling your local workers..."

By "them" I meant the overseas workers. My bad.

[harryh]

In some cases they are, but as the people across the ocean have gotten richer (much much richer) their working conditions have improved dramatically. Success!

[claudiawerner]

Have they? The state of labour laws in the countries which produce cheap goods sold to Western countries seem generally poor, especially given the timeframe for which this has been happening. It's also suspect how work is treated merely as a matter of wage and benefits rather than a question of the nature of wage labour itself.

[harryh]

Have they?

Unequivocally yes! Understanding this ironclad fact is one of the most important things to understand about changes in the world economy over the last 50 years.

China has gone from a country full of subsistence farmers to a country of middle class wage earners.

[claudiawerner]

>Do you think it's immoral when you, say, switch from Verizon to AT&T to get a cheaper rate on your cell phone plan?

This is an astounding comparison that seems to aim to reduce questions of exploitation down to questions of personal morality, rather than the actual historical development of the systems we have and the ones we like to see. Is it immoral to switch phone providers? I don't think so. Is the system in which switching a cell phone provider can actually harm labourers morally questionable, even on the grounds that liberal egalitarians set out? For sure.

[methodover]

Yeah, this is another aspect of the debate I find myself challenging: Labor is different. Our human lives are different than a cell phone plan.

[harryh]

What do you think makes up most of the cost of a cell phone plan?

Labor.

[methodover]

In regards to swapping cell phone plans, sure: If a cell phone company were to die because too many of their customers switched to a better competitor, that would be difficult for the employees of that company.

But that's an entirely different situation than the matter at hand, where we're talking about the United States government's policies on trade and the impact on our entire labor class and their fate within our own borders.

The entire point of an economy is to serve humanity. We're all participating in this circus to put food on our tables, provide for our children, grow, and enjoy life. We cannot lose sight of that fact. We have an obligation to see labor not as just cogs in a machine, but rather as constituents whose well-being we have an obligation to protect.

(I have to say, and I'm sure you don't mean it, but you comparing a human being to a cell phone plan is among the more callous things I've read on these forums. It might behoove you to sprinkle a bit more empathy in your language, just a tiny bit.)

[harryh]

It's all the same though.

In the vast majority of circumstances you aren't firing an individual American and hiring an individual from China. You're just choosing to buy something from a giant corporation that manufactures goods in China instead of a competing giant corporation that manufactures goods in the US. Switching cell phone providers is just like switching from American Giant (made in America) to some other purveyor of sweaters that manufactures overseas.

Are you saying that you think you have a moral obligation to buy things made by American workers, who are universally wealthier and have access to a much stronger social safety net, than Chinese workers?

If anything it seems like it would be the opposite to me.

[shkkmo]

> Let me play the devil’s advocate: you buying those products is measurably better for those disadvantaged blue collar workers, than you not buying it (on a 10 year horizon IIRC - There are some UN studies on this, on phone and can’t find them right now).

Maybe in some cases.

However, you then have labor in those countries trying to struggle for the same protections and advances in wages that workers in the US struggled for, but they are struggling against a far more powerful corporate entity that has the backing of a more corrupt/disfunctional government while also having diversified options to break and weather strikes.

Then you have to add to that all the non blue collar workers who have had their subsistence livelihoods destroyed through land seizures for resource extraction.

Most of the benefits of globalization roll uphill (richer citizens, especially in richer countries extract most of the benefits) the trickle down is minuscule to non-existent.

[cactus2093]

Yes people still have challenges and problems. But at the end of day, there are hundreds of millions fewer people in poverty than there were just a few decades ago. None of what you're saying justifies that the alternative would have been better, where most of these people remained poor subsistance farmers.

[shkkmo]

> , there are hundreds of millions fewer people in poverty than there were just a few decades ago.

And how much of that is due to globalization and how much of that is due to the growth of local economies? How much faster would those local economies have grown if wealth was not being siphoned out by multi-nationals? (These are not honest inquiries, not rhetorical questions.)

> None of what you're saying justifies that the alternative would have been better, where most of these people remained poor subsistance farmers.

The people who were poor subsistence farm who had their lands given away are generally not those who have been lifted out of poverty.

[barry-cotter]

In China it’s almost all due to globalization. Multinationals doing siphon out wealth. They invest huge amounts of money in foreign direct investment, enabling faster growth than if all capital had to be domestically sourced and they take some of those profits and repatriate them, but the wages they pay and the capital investment they make stay in country.

In China the people who were poor subsistence farmers absolutely are those lifted out of poverty. The numbers are just too great for it to work any other way, with urbanization going from ~20% in 1980 to 70 or 80% now. Similarly in Korea.

[davidw]

> a more corrupt/disfunctional government

You...sure about that?

[noonespecial]

You adjust the system, however obfuscated and difficult it seems, so that they work to better themselves instead of for you. Because at the very bottom layer, that's what's happening.

[AWildC182]

Maybe a better way forward is for labor cost disparity to be just small enough to encourage jobs by being cost effective after shipping with a hint of extra profit rather than a make-several-one-trillion-dollar-companies cost disparity.